Ep. 1990: Luck Isn’t Skill

SPEAKER_03 0:02

There the fella, selling silver in the sand With a map to a mountain that ain't there He'll ride it till you're broke And he'll shake you by the hand Then he'll leave you with a saddle and a prayer So ride it slow Snow Let the dusty decade ride Every trail that flitters cost you plenty And the boring trail is free talking real money Talking real money Yep we're feeling the a little wild like the wild

Anecdotes Aren’t Evidence

SPEAKER_03 0:45

Wild West Little cowboy song from Talking Real Money Hi everybody Don McDonald here moseying down the financial road trying to help you all become better investors and uh quit falling for well lack of evidence. In other words, anecdotes. And the word anecdote is going to play uh heavily in today's uh topic because anecdotes are not evidence. Okay, let's let's just right off the bat, just because you did something doesn't mean you're good at doing that something. And a good example might be there are professional poker players, people who make a living playing poker, which is a game that combines skill and luck, okay? Skill and luck. It's a little bit of both. You can't make luck, but you can make skill. But can you win at poker for a while and have no skill? Yeah, that's the luck component. But if you are, you win, you go like, I just won ten hands in a row at poker. I must be a great poker player. No, that is not evidence of skill. That is merely evidence of luck. It is an anecdote, folks. Now, with that established, today's topic comes to us from the book of Jason Zwag again. We love Jason over at the Wall Street Journal. And Jason uh got a little hot under the collar at uh some of his readers' responses to a recent column, Tom.

SPEAKER_02 2:12

Yeah, the column said you're not tough enough to earn these huge returns. You're not tough enough to earn. I love that. That's it's a great title.

SPEAKER_03 2:20

You're not tough enough to take me

Leverage Can Bite Hard

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on.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

You need a a sweeper. Uh he explored whether holding leveraged exchange traded funds for the long run is a good idea. And guess what? He doesn't think it's a good idea. Now, these are funds that uh that try to double or triple the daily returns of underlying assets like index.

SPEAKER_03 2:42

Right by borrowing money. That's the leverage.

SPEAKER_02 2:46

Single stock one, cryptocurrency. And as Jason points out, over long horizons, leverage DTFs can deviate sharply from the assets they track. You could make big money and you could lose big money. Now he walked through some real life examples, uh, which I love because as you said, evidence is evidence, anecdotes are anecdotes. So, for example, um the TQQQ, which is not a fund that we use nor would we recommend. No, not hardly 3x.

SPEAKER_03 3:21

Yep. The NASDAQ 100.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

Three times, which is the NASDAQ00, you know, which had a great day recently. It's had some bad days recently. Um, I think it's still I think it's pretty close to its all-time high. Again, that you could take that for what it's worth. But this fund says, well, just making the big money that the the Nasdaq 100 has made, and it's been pretty good of late, it'd be better to make 3x. So he he gives some hard, real examples in his piece. Five weeks of the market response to COVID 19 and 2020, NASDAQ 100 fell 28%. The TQQQ, that lost 70%. 70% of your money. How about 2022 in the index? Again, the NASDAQ 100 index dropped 32%. TQQQ lost 80%. Um, and then there's the more recent example, mid-February to early April last year, NASDAQ 100 down about 23%. And the TQQQ lost 57%. So you more than doubled your losses. Yeah exactly. I mean, and and and to watch this thing day to day must be wow, crazy. But what always happens, it happens to us too, by the way. We make we go back and look at the evidence, the actual numbers, and I can tell you, by the way, having talked to investors for whatever, 30 plus years, very few of you can take a loss of 79%. Not very many of you can. I I've seen it. I've seen it up close and personal. 2008, 2020, 2020, all those places where people they generally start crying at about 25 to 30 percent. I mean crying crying like as in pain, as in you know, me jumping in the lake the other day, like real crying. This is really physically painful.

SPEAKER_03 5:14

It's a little too cold there for lake jumping up.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

So you find out who you are in those circumstances, but you don't want to do that. But here's what happens: we tell you about these numbers, and then people call in our case call or write and say, No, that's

Winners Tell Risky Stories

SPEAKER_02 5:29

not a problem. Well, that's what happened with Jason. So he provided the names of people that did that. For example, and I'm only going to give the first name, he says, Christopher emailed him, said, My wife would be happy to report to you that in 2010 I invested a fair portion of her very tiny Roth IRA in TQQQ. Over the years, I've consistently sold large portions of it to Diversify, but her Roth IRA still holds 1,920 shares for a total return, he says, of 32,000 percent. He didn't give specific numbers on how much they actually made. In hindsight, he says I kicked myself for selling any part of it over the years.

SPEAKER_03 6:10

Oh, wait, I wonder why he sold along the way.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Makes me a lot of things.

SPEAKER_03 6:15

I bet he got scared. I bet he got scared because I ran the numbers, and just as this is just a rough number, because it make this is a difficult fit number to figure out. But if the QQQ had a nice smooth decline over the course of days, it was but it was a dramatic one, and it it accounted, it went up to about 78% loss, you know, a big one. Like like 2000. Well, but remember that the SP 500 lost 50 percent in 2008. So the QQQ is more volatile. It could, if it lost almost 80 percent, your value of the TQQQ would be almost 100%.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

Wow, that's talk about crying. Uh Ellen wrote him and said she'd invested a little over $3,000 in TQQQ in 2014, and now it's worth more than $150,000. She added that it's one of the best wealth-building vehicles, especially for younger investors who can put aside their investments for long periods of time, and if the investment is more, no more than a small percentage of their total portfolio. At least she's honest about that. So, I mean, but here's the thing about any of this. Number one, very few, and I will say very few people I know can take losses like that. Number two, he points this out returns are period dependent, anecdotal. You could get in the right day, get out the wrong day, or maybe get in the right day and get out the right day. It it's so weird. And when you're doing it with leverage like this, it's it's so much worse. I mean, for example, he he points out some other leverage, the Moderna stock that went to zero last month on the London Stock Exchange, et cetera, et cetera. He gave some other specific examples of this, but leverage funds are just it's combustible. It's not a place to be playing around unless you really are playing around.

SPEAKER_03 8:13

Gambling.

SPEAKER_02 8:13

Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_03 8:14

It has to be. No, to to call it anything else is disingenuous. It's just fibbing to yourself. Oh no, it's a great investment. No, it's not. It's gambling. You bet that it would go up more than it would go down, and you were right because you bet on the right side, which uh uh that means one thing. One thing only. You were lucky. Yeah, and you're feeling lucky.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

We're happy, by the way. People rise and say, oh, I you know, you're gonna be mad at me. I'm not gonna be mad at you if you made money. I'm happy for you. But uh, Jason also points out back to the uh the time dependence of all this, he he writes the past decade and a half have been a golden age for leverage funds. Interest rates were at rock bottom until recently, stocks boomed. But no golden age lasts forever, especially in markets. If rates keep going up and markets go down, the same leverage that magnified wealth on the way up will destroy it on the way down.

Time Makes Returns Change

SPEAKER_02 9:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:13

There is the interesting fact. Now, we can actually look at at the other side of the coin by looking at at inverse leveraged ETFs. Because while the the positive ETFs have gone up, the the because the the market's been rising. What about those ETFs that bet on the downside, that bet it would fall? Well, there was one, a single stock one on Moderna. Yeah. That was an inverse ETF and it went to Zero. Zero.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

Yeah. I mean you can everything. But not a penny more, by the way. Um here's what I find about these purchases, uh, because we run into a lot of individual stock purchases, not so much not very few people come to us and have this sort of position, but individual stocks, and here's what I think happens. By the way, I think it's gonna happen in this case. Once you buy this and you've made 32,000 percent or gone from 3,000 to 150,000, it's gonna be really hard for you to sell that emotionally. I guarantee it because I run into it with people who have owned Microsoft since, you know, 1988.

SPEAKER_03 10:22

Yeah, but it did so well before it's gonna do it again. And that's the point. I know Microsoft. I used to work there, I know the company. Sure you do.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

It's right down the street.

SPEAKER_03 10:32

I can go over and look at Redmond and wait. Redmond isn't doing as well as it did during the hate day.

SPEAKER_02 10:39

No, not close. But the thing is, we have a great sense of overconfidence when when something, and you pointed out the open, when something's gone well, we believe it was because we're really smart and we just knew what the heck we're doing. So we are not gonna let go of that investment. My worry would be that maybe you did strike it right. You bought it in 2010 or 2000, the bottom of 2022, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_03 11:01

Congratulations, get out, do something smarter now. Exactly. But you know, you know deep down you were come on. I mean, do you do you really believe that these people are just that stupid that they believe they're that smart? No, I think they've just deluded themselves into believing they're that smart. And deep down they know they're frauds. They are not brilliant investors. Deep down. You you you like the yeah, the bravado. Yeah, bro, I my stocks really did well. I may pick this and that. Come on, you know deep down you're not smarter than the market. Because if you think if if you actually think you're smarter than the market, then you're dumber than people should be. Really, you are.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

And you're gonna pay a hefty price for believing how smart you're gonna do.

SPEAKER_03 11:46

Someday the piper will be paid and you will not enjoy the tune.

SPEAKER_02 11:51

Don't use leverage, be diversified, keep your costs low, and pay attention to taxes and thinking about doing it.

SPEAKER_03 11:57

If you're thinking about it, you're going, uh, that's a great pitch. I really think maybe I think I should do it, because maybe this guy's smarter, and maybe I'm not, but they are. Well, send us your question about that. Do that like now. We'd love to hear it. Go to talkingrealmoney.com. You know, that's our website. And there's a button that says ask a question. It's really prominent up in the upper right hand corner. Or there's a little microphone in the lower right-hand corner where you can speak your question to me, and I'll do it on the Friday QA. So just do that because if you type them, Tom also gets to enjoy the pleasure of tactile paper stimulation in his tiny.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Get me my chainsaw, man. Start taking those trees down. Ouch. Now we just took one for that one.

SPEAKER_03 12:49

This way he has big sheets of paper.

SPEAKER_02 12:51

Yeah, thank you. That's really appreciative. Uh hey, Ricky, we're gonna answer your question. Ricky from Stafford, Virginia.

unknown 12:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

Hello, Tom and Don. Love the show. And I've been binging in the last three years of shows recently. So you're basically in my ears five hours a day. Can you imagine? No, I can't. I I hope the mental hospital isn't that. I'm really getting nervous for you, Ricky. I'm gonna call my doctor and see if they got a pill for you or something.

SPEAKER_03 13:18

You know, we're just uh we're just like uh like a week, ten days away from our 2000th official episode.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

I know you've been putting the numbers on all of them now. It's amazing. I I forgot to mention that when I was talking about the numbers recently. I gotta add that. Uh he says I'm a government employee with a TSP account. I recently used Chat GPT to do a historical analysis of performance. I believe that's AI, right? And returns during the career to date. I'm kidding. My time period was looking at the returns in the TSP from 2003 to 2025. I understand that small, I'm referring, I'm assuming he's referring to small caps.

SPEAKER_03 13:56

Cap the S fund.

SPEAKER_02 13:57

Yep, and international show a little extra return when put into portfolios over long periods of time. During my career, the 100% C fund, which is large cap stocks, outperformed any other mix of C S I threw at it. In fact, the more heavily I weighted small and international, the worst it did by a lot. Further, I had to calculate how much S would have to perform in with C he goes into a whole bunch of this. It would take 20 years at 1.5% performance to make up a choice, et cetera. Uh the bottom line here, and I'm I'm paraphrasing a bit, is so for me in my lifetime, it's unlikely that the more diverse portfolio is going to come out the winner. In other words, it would have been better to just be in the C fund than the first one. No, okay.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

Would have been better. Yes, sir. That is absolutely true.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

It's close, by the way. I went back and looked at the numbers.

SPEAKER_03 14:46

But okay, it doesn't matter whether it's close or not. The reality is what you're looking at is merely past. Past tense is meaningless. Okay, yeah. Let's uh let's just assume for a moment, and it's it's a ridiculous assumption, but let's assume for a moment, because you know, we're of course the most powerful nation on earth. Um, but could we slip and fall? Could a banana skin be placed in our path? Whoops, woo! Um Yeah. What if, what if we had a decade, and I know this would never happen, but what if there was a 10-year period in the future where the US market did horribly negative returns, like you know, negative 1% a year, even. Oh, now you're looking in the past again. No, I'm talking going forward. I'm just this is hypothetical. Okay. Let's say it lost like one percent a year um in the next 10 years. And let's say those international markets gained, I don't know, let's say eight percent a year over the next ten years. Would that bring your return up from today through there? Yeah. Assuming that scenario. Um and that would never happen ever. Never ha oh wait, oh, I'm sorry. Oh, 2000 wait, 2000 to two that exact thing happened between 2000 and 2010? Yeah, it it did. Okay. But it was that exact thing, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 16:10

Period-dependent returns. I believe that's what Jason just mentioned. So I went and looked at our friend Mark Hebner's site at IFA, just out of curiosity, to look at the asset class, not the fund, 2003 through 2025. U.S. small cap value as an asset class, 11.3% a year. U.S. core, those the bigger stocks like the C fund, 11.6%. So it's basically a draw. And remember, more diversification, a good thing. Adding international has been over the long haul a good thing.

SPEAKER_03 16:42

And it's not, by the way, a good thing for improving your overall return necessarily. It's mainly about reducing volatility so that you don't suffer a 10-year loss just being in the United States or just being in large cap or just being in growth or whatever that's concentration. Yeah, you've got concentration risk. So this is again, this is to to some extent it's a little bit of data mining.

unknown 17:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

I think it's and to to take 2003.

SPEAKER_03 17:10

Yeah, where did 2003 come from?

SPEAKER_02 17:13

I think he mentions why that was the case. I don't know. I mean go back to ninety. Yeah, go back to ninety nine, it'll look different.

SPEAKER_03 17:20

It'll look different. Um but the reality is the past doesn't we that's why we say over and over again, past performance does not indicate future results. Oh, do we say that? Okay. We have to, I think it's a law thing. Um but the reality is there is incredible evidence, incredible evidence, scientific evidence, not anecdotes, evidence that over a longer period of time than that 22-year, 23, 22-year period, uh having international has saved you at times. Small cap has actually outperformed large. Value stocks have actually outperformed growth, but not all the time. So it depends on the time period you picked. You happen to pick a 20-year period that was the best in the last 100 years for large company growth stocks, in other words, the C fund.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

Yeah, and and as I pointed out, even then, still basically a draw with U.S. small cap value, which over a hundred years has way outperformed.

SPEAKER_03 18:25

Way outperformed. I mean way outperformed. The 100-year return on um and I I'm just grabbing this off the top of my head, between large cap growth and small cap value has been by, I think, if I remember correctly, it was like a factor of a hundred.

SPEAKER_02 18:43

Yeah, it's something like that. It's it was huge.

SPEAKER_03 18:46

And I again I'm not don't don't quote me on this.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

Almost it's uh about four percent a year if you put the value part in the right.

SPEAKER_03 18:52

It was a huge additional return, though, in total return, in the total return number over that period of time. Yeah. And I again I don't have it in front of me.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

So, Ricky, don't lose those numbers.

SPEAKER_03 19:05

Sorry. That's okay. Sorry. That must be a good thing. You have any other questions?

SPEAKER_02 19:08

I do, actually, and I think this is one you're gonna really like in my little hands in big pieces of paper. I don't know how to take that, but it's not good.

Annuity Sales on YouTube

SPEAKER_02 19:16

I'll put it that way. Uh, because Joe wrote us from Eatonville, Washington. Beautiful place. Out in the woods. And uh Joe was out looking at YouTube because you know, there's a lot of people.

SPEAKER_03 19:28

Oh, is this the YouTube thing you sent me? I had so much fun with it.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

He said there are there, these two are slick annuity sellers advisors. I'm so glad to hear you both sometimes once a week. Putting the best down on annuities. I've been having fun commenting on KCIIS YouTube videos. I I watch them trying to save people from falling into the trap of the hybrid pension annuity. If you get a chance, check out what they're saying on their YouTube channel speaking as it's the way to secure your retirement. Unbelievable. Here's what they do.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

It's so clever. Oh, it's so clever.

SPEAKER_03 20:06

They lay out a case against them. They say, Oh, come on, can you really get a 10 to 20 percent return on an hybrid annuity?

SPEAKER_02 20:16

Come on.

SPEAKER_03 20:17

That just sounds too good to be true. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, here's the thing. These guys are uh they're uh a 100% insurance sales house. Okay, they're selling a version of an indexed annuity with uh annuitization at the end. That's right. Uh they are my guess.

SPEAKER_02 20:34

But you can take out 10% a year.

SPEAKER_03 20:37

Oh, big flipping deal. There's a surrender charger, probably, I don't know, on their policies because they handle 50 different companies. But there's a there's a surrender let's start at the very beginning. Yeah, let's go back. Let's go way back. They run the the numbers, okay? It's really interesting the way they play this game. If you put a million dollars in when you're 55 and you start annuitizing when you're 65, you may oh, and they use the word may a lot, you may be able to collect 14.9% income in retirement. May. May. So are you getting a 14.9% return on your investment when you retire? No, I I actually ran the IRR, the internal rate of return from age 55. And here's the deal. Remember, the insurance companies have these things called actuarial tables that are very well researched. They know on average when most people are going to die. Do you want to play the the odds? You want to you want to play the game with the insurance company? You're probably gonna lose because they know the numbers better than you do.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

So have you asked them about mine? How long do I have?

SPEAKER_03 21:44

Just out of curiosity. It's it's it's any minute you're looking for. Oh. It's bad. Okay, let me look at this the magic eight ball now. Oh no. Not good. No.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Not good. I'm gonna have a really big breakfast then. So not good.

SPEAKER_03 21:56

Um, so let's say you put a million bucks in. You're one of those people who are unlucky and you die at 70. What's your internal rate of return? Negative. You would have collected about $890,000 on your million. By the way, they had 10 years to grow while you gave it to them. Okay? So now at 75 you died. It's not 14% return. It's three. It's three. The internal rate of return is three? Three percent. So if you die at 85, your internal rate of return on that money, even though you collected three million at 85. How much? Now that's where most people are that's the average for women dying. Yep. You and I are your internal rate of return is just over six.

unknown 23:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:02

Okay. And you had no liquidity.

SPEAKER_03 23:05

No liquidity. It wasn't your money anymore.

SPEAKER_02 23:08

But you did get to watch those nice videos on YouTube.

SPEAKER_03 23:12

And they they I I I had to come up with what I wanted to say. I was I was looking at it, I'm going, you know, they they are really, they're basically, I thought, they're lying by omission and confusion. But lying is too strong a word because they're not lying, really. Misleading.

SPEAKER_02 23:32

Oh, okay. Provaricating. Oh, which is underused today. I'd like to.

SPEAKER_03 23:37

Right. Provarication is underused. And this prevarication is the key to the insurance the investment insurance industry's sales pitches. Because it's not about for example, I guarantee you, I looked on their website. They don't tell you the commission anywhere that they receive. My guess is the commission varies somewhere between six and ten percent, uh, depending on the product and the insurance company that's selling it.

SPEAKER_02 24:07

Wait, did you say give them a million dollars? That would be a lot of money they make then.

SPEAKER_03 24:11

That would be a lot of money. And by the way, the dictionary definition of varicate is to sp now tell me if this doesn't apply perfectly, Tom. To speak or act in an ambiguous or evasive way to conceal the truth. Does that sound like the insurance industry?

SPEAKER_02 24:31

Sounds like what you're gonna be hearing a lot between now and early November, too, by the way. So yes.

SPEAKER_03 24:35

Yeah, no kidding. They are prevaricate insurance prevaricators. And this is all a big pitch, and it is slick and it is shiny, and it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help you, God.

SPEAKER_02 24:51

And I think we can just, in a most general sense, there's some good stuff on YouTube, but in a general way, that's probably not your place to go look for investment advice or retirement advice from the state.

SPEAKER_03 25:02

I would hazard a guess that most of it is prevarication.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

Yeah, I think that is. And only if you're not sure.

SPEAKER_03 25:07

That's gonna be my all-purpose word. Oh, you're a

Fed Rates and Bond Yields

SPEAKER_03 25:09

prevaricator. Yeah, that's good.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

Uh, before we go, I want to mention something because it came up recently. Uh, someone was in the office complaining about the uh Federal Reserve raising interest rates. You know, we kind of forget. I mean, yes, it's gonna mean more if you owe on a credit card or if you want to get a well, the mortgage thing is separate, but all this happens.

SPEAKER_03 25:28

Exactly. Remember, the Fed rate is just an overnight rate. It's an overnight rate. So but it really does affect longer term rates directly.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

It will mean more probably for things like auto loans, credit cards. So if you're a borrower in those cases, yeah, that's gonna be painful. But many of you are savers, and many of you kind of want something. Well, you talk about it, Don. You've got the CD ladder going.

SPEAKER_03 25:51

I have BND and a C D ladder. I have both.

SPEAKER_02 25:54

And so right now, uh, if you are willing to get a two-year CD, you can get 4.4% for that. If you want to put your money in a high yield savings account and look at these at bankrate.com, which anybody didn't go do, right now you can get 4%, 4%. Or if you still believe that the U.S. government will pay you back and the interest that they owe you, you can get a 10-year treasury for right about 5%. So if you're a saver and you don't want to take any real risk with your money, you know, raising those interest rates a bit were a good thing for you, not necessarily for the people borrowing, but for the people that are you know using that.

SPEAKER_03 26:32

Actually, and this is one of the things we've talked about BND, and people go, well, it loses money. But BND's 30-day SEC yield, which is actually a low figure. The 30-day SEC yield is a conservative figure uh because it takes into account the whole 30 days. Yeah, is currently sitting at about four. When I we recorded this, it was just below 4.9%. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 26:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 26:54

And the yield of maturity is right at 5%.

SPEAKER_02 26:58

So good money. If if you're inclined to, you know, put money in something like that, then that that's helpful in some ways, right? Now you the principal has had a tough time here for the last 30 days, but it hasn't been as horrible as the press has made it out to be.

SPEAKER_03 27:11

I'll put it that way. Going back a little bit, we don't suggest that your fixed income portfolio be for that purpose. No. We don't suggest that you look at it as a yield generator. Remember, it's a stability tool. That's what it's there to do. It's it's to add stability. So it won't go down as much. BND should not ever go down anywhere near as much in a bad market as the stock market would. It hasn't. Never happened.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Never.

unknown 27:37

No.

SPEAKER_03 27:38

Never. It isn't even there's an it's not even close.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

No, no.

SPEAKER_03 27:41

The worst year ever was less than it was like 13 or 14. It wasn't it wasn't the equivalent of even a little baby bear market.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

It wasn't even no bear market, you need 20 percent. So it's not at all.

SPEAKER_03 27:52

It's about stability. Relative stability, not yield. But the yield's better. That helps the stability because it adds that money. So B and D can go down a little bit more now because it's got a little extra income.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Relative stability. That's how I look at my second marriage. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

That's what came to mind. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

Probably shouldn't have been. I know. It's relatively stability.

SPEAKER_03 28:16

I'm sorry, I was good thing your wife doesn't listen.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

No, she doesn't know how to. That's good news. And now they're not on the radio anymore. She has no idea.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

Yeah, you don't know how to put Hulu on the TV in your gym.

unknown 28:27

That's a good point.

SPEAKER_03 28:28

He has a gym. Not a guy named Jim who works around the house.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

It's without it, I would be completely insane, worse than I am today.

SPEAKER_03 28:36

So you'd be glad for it. So apparently, do you can you listen to a podcast? Do you know how? I do, yes.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

I listen to podcasters you know regularly. So I have my favorites. Yeah, I do.

SPEAKER_03 28:46

But there are none out there quite like this one. And that may be a good thing. Yeah, probably. Uh it's called Talking Real Money. Go to talkingrealmoney.com if you want to check out our 1900 and some odd podcasts that are there. There are others. I have been digging around on old hard drives, trying to find them. I'm trying to find them. The thing is, I realize that a lot of them, they're not really podcasts. They never became podcasts back in the early days of doing the show on the radio. So I have a lot of old radio shows from Como back in the days when it was Como. Um because remember, our first few years were all uh it was radio.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

Yeah. I can't remember when we added started you started turning them into podcasts. Yeah, I Somewhere around 2014, I think you said or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 29:37

So I didn't do anything. And then by the way, it was it was one or two

No Party for Episode 2000

SPEAKER_03 29:41

a week, not five.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

Are we gonna do anything big on number two thousand? Nope, not a darn thing. Okay. Nope. Another day, another podcast.

SPEAKER_03 29:49

Another day, another podcast. Because the one after that will be two thousand one. Should we celebrate that? It's kind of like Disney. Every five years, it's a big anniversary. Well, actually, it's more than it's more than that because then they can find like when Mickey Mouse was born, when Walt Disney was born, when Donald Duck was born, when you know they they can turn every year into a party at Disney World.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Sure, why not? See you in July in uh beautiful uh Orlando.

SPEAKER_03 30:13

Don't go to Orlando in July, please, folks. It is not the time of year to go to Disney World. I know the kids are out of school, that's totally unfair, but here's the thing. Uh make them read an extra book and take them out during the school year if you want to bring them to Disney.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

Read, read, actually, before you go to Disney in July, read about living on the surface of the moon the sun, pardon me. Because it'll be a similar example.

SPEAKER_03 30:36

We went the other night, Debbie and I went the other night just for a couple of hours, and it wasn't that hot. It was in the 80s, the upper eighties, which for us isn't that hot. But the humidity was 98%. Oh, God. And I thought we were gonna die. We made it two hours and we went, that's it. We're out of here. We're going home. We're gonna sit down.

SPEAKER_02 30:55

My favorite ride on a day like today is the air-conditioned bus back to the parking lot.

SPEAKER_03 31:00

Or the air-conditioned car.

SPEAKER_02 31:01

One or the other.

SPEAKER_03 31:02

All right, we gotta go. Thanks for being a part of it. If you have questions, send them in at talkingrealmoney.com. If you want to meet with an appella advisor, literally for free for nothing with no high-pressure sales pits, just click the meet and advisor button. Keep telling friends, and keep listening, well, nearly every day to Talking Real Money.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

The opinions and views expressed on this podcast were current on the date recorded. Opinions, estimates, forecasts, and statements of financial market trends that are based on current market conditions constitute our judgment and are subject to change without notice, including any forward-looking estimates or statements which are based on certain expectations and assumptions. Although information and opinions given have been obtained from or based on sources believed to be reliable, no warranty or representation is made as to their correctness, completeness, or accuracy. Information presented on the podcast is not personalized investment advice from Oppello Wealth. The views and strategies described may not be suitable for everyone. This podcast does not identify all the risks, direct or indirect, or other considerations which might be material to you when entering any financial transaction. The podcast is not trying to get you to buy or sell any financial products or security. Instead, the program is provided as a public service by Apello Wealth, a fee-only registered investment advisor. Please see Apello Wealth's ADB part 2A on our website for information regarding Apollo's fees and services. Apellet Capital, LLC DBA Apello Wealth, is an investment advisory firm registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm only transacts business in the states where it is properly registered or excluded or exempt from registration requirements. Registration with the SEC or any state securities authority does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Apello does not provide tax or legal advice, and nothing either stated or implied here should be inferred as providing such advice. Thanks for listening, and please visit talkingrealmoney.com for more information and important disclosure related to performance of any specific index or fund quoted in this podcast. And the lawyers get richer.